We had to wait ~30 years for the 1st economist to alert other economists to altered operations?

Be still my beating heart!

And another 50 years for a trickle of economists and economic programs and textbooks to start to notice?

Is the hair standing up on anyone else's neck?

What the hell - INDEED! - does this say about the difference between orthodox economics and actual results? Is the difference between economic theory and operational practice always 100%, not just greater in practice than in theory? And is that by design, or insularity, or insanity ... or all 3?

In economics, progress does NOT occur one funeral at a time! Rather, economics has become immune to reality! Since the forced retirement of Marriner Eccles from the Fed, progress in political economy now requires the death of entire generations of economics textbooks, and Nobel Prize Committees too. Weren't Nobel Prizes supposed to be for practical applications?

When it comes to burning books, maybe we should make an emergency exception for all existing economics text books? Do it as a threat to National Security.

Is there another way to break Lerner's argument as long as we believe in the accelerationist Phillips curve--as long as we believe that full employment also produces inflation outcomes equal to inflation expectations?

Friday, August 30, 2013

I am now using Friday’s blog space to provide draft versions of the Modern Monetary Theory textbook that I am writing with my colleague and friend Randy Wray. We expect to complete the text during 2013 (to be ready in draft form for second semester teaching). Comments are always welcome. Remember this is a textbook aimed at undergraduate students and so the writing will be different from my usual blog free-for-all. Note also that the text I post is just the work I am doing by way of the first draft so the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change once the two of us have edited it.

"Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these [economic] facts." ---" In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible." Hernando de Soto

While de Soto may have missed the actual causality, he was accidentally right about the outcomes.

It is "sustained economic development that leads to pressure from emerging businesses and individuals for more secure [human] rights."Milford Bateman [in a comment]

Nevertheless, the outcomes de Soto mentioned are, indeed, disturbing claims which certainly cloud our understanding of our present context. How are we to proceed, to map and master this context?

One standard rule for contingency management is to follow the 3I's, Instigation (causality), Intercept (intermediary agents) Impact (surviving the moment).

Impact? In the case of domestic impact of things already hitting home, we're being saved primarily by Automatic Stabilizers, mostly enacted ~80 years ago. These are now under attack, as ~40% of our own citizens are routinely brainwashed into voting for policies which are clearly self-destructive.

Intercepting the agents promoting our most self-destructive propaganda? I'm not sure we're yet close to holding our own against the Koch Bros, Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson et al.

Instigation or causality? It is in that topic that the most information is being published, but, ironically the lowest population penetration is being achieved. It's a rare Jane or Joe Sixpack indeed who knows what MMT or Control Fraud means, or even that there are other beers NOT named Budweiser! We're stockpiling situational commentary, but the bulk of the population is still being diverted and distracted from orienting to these messages, for a variety of reasons, both active and passive.

How dire is our circumstance? It depends on an accurate assessment of both Adaptive Demand and our ability to scale up adequate responses on-demand. Americans have always been confident of their ability to construct as well as cross a bridge once they come to a challenge. However, what happens if we can't even build a bridge in time? If we don't pay attention to our metaphorical bridge-building capabilities, that time will surely come sooner, rather than later!

How are all our metaphorical bridge-building capabilities, i.e., what is our Adaptive Rate? Can we even measure it? How would we make a formal assessment?

In every field there is a constant ebb and flow of methodological excellence, in response to crisis, and intervening lack of Adaptive Demand. That is to be expected.

When the first Rome fell, Darwin's theories on evolution and Adaptive Rate had not been explicitly published - although they may have been implicitly acknowledged by many, in many disciplines.

In terms of the factors determining whether the USA will or won't fall, are we any closer because Darwin published his explicit analyses?

Or, is our group context large enough, and changing fast enough, that it doesn't matter how much an insufficient number of citizens know?

There are no explicit expressions of either Adaptive Rate or Central Planning among known Roman-era literature. However, the many Greek and early Roman essays explicitly about Democracy versus Tyranny indicates that they were well aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses.

All this is likely to give some readers a distinctly uneasy feeling ... that few principles governing our social situation have changed in the last 2000 years. That despite all the details that have changed.

We're left with at least 3, key questions.

1) Are enough US citizens aware of our net context to adequately manage it's future course? Or are we as a nation flying blind?

2) Even if there are enough concerned citizens, are they possessing AND SHARING cultural-assessment tools adequate for guiding adaptive group actions that can address their growing concerns?

3) And even if we do have both adequate group intelligence AND adequate cultural self-assessment tools ... are we practicing enough to be able to meet looming demands when they arrive?

Where did most of the citizens go when Rome fell? Where should we be planning to go to? Is there anywhere to go, other than drawing a line in our own, domestic sandbox, and fighting for progress rather than accepting regression?

How different is this from past national policy crises during your lifetime?

And are we improving or reducing our ability to adjust ... or even treading water?

Can we even assess things well enough to tell? Does our electorate still have the motivation to even want to?

*The Fed honchos, of course, claim that they are baffled and befuddled by the behavior of banks and hedge funds. No wonder Jane & Joe prefer another sixpack.

This is a curiously loaded statement with multiple implications, whether intended or unintended.

Controlling fraud, at all levels? How on earth can any whistleblower EVER speak truth to power?

If a person this compromised and unprepared, no matter how intelligent, could be haphazardly saddled with so much responsibility for shepherding our own military risk exposure ... what does that say about the level of competence - and responsibility - of those in ranks above him or her?*

If we have to worry more about our own people talking to our own citizens about our own actions ... than we worry about what supposed enemies are doing ... then we're clearly doing the wrong things from the get go!

Given this example, it's no wonder that more sophisticated people in government and on Wall Street - even with less intelligence - were embezzling such massive amounts of fiat from the US Middle Class, by diverting it to maladaptive purposes. What good is Public Purpose if it's stolen, and misapplied to purposes that cause net harm to public purpose?

*Haven't yet heard any summary of how many heads rolled above Bradley Manning's command level, while taking responsibility for the more than one train of incompetent events that led up to the whistleblowing actions.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

It's remarkable how low America places in healthcare efficiency: among the 48 countries included in the Bloomberg study, the U.S. ranks 46th, outpacing just Serbia and Brazil. Once that sinks in, try this one on for size: the U.S. ranks worse than China, Algeria, and Iran.

But the sheer numbers are really what's humbling about this list: the U.S. ranks second in healthcare cost per capita ($8,608), only to be outspent by Switzerland ($9,121) -- which, for the record, boasts a top-10 healthcare system in terms of efficiency. Furthermore, the U.S. is tops in terms of healthcare cost relative to GDP, with 17.2 percent of the country's wealth spent on medical care for every American.

In other words, the world's richest country spends more of its money on healthcare while getting less than almost every other nation in return.

How important should the subject of poverty be within the discipline of economics? Some economists appear to think it is a very small issue compared to the magnificent mathematics of general equilibrium theory. Others believe that economics should fundamentally be about the sources of human well-being and misery, and that understanding poverty is absolutely fundamental for economics. How should we try to sort this out?

Understanding Society — Innovative thinking about social agency and structure in a global worldPoverty and economicsDaniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Pavlina Tcherneva has a new paper up at the website of the Levy Institute of Bard College. In the paper, “Reorienting Fiscal Policy: A Critical Assessment of Fiscal Fine-Tuning,” Tcherneva argues for a bottom-up approach to countercyclical fiscal policy that explicitly targets the employment gap to achieve what Minsky called “tight full employment.” She opposes her approach to conventional pump-priming and newer New Consensus approaches that primarily target aggregate demand and output, and only achieve higher employment as a by-product of the growth in demand and investment. These conventional approaches are trickle down methods that exacerbate social inequalities and inequalities in labor skills, ratchet up the problem of long-term unemployment, and ultimately direct more income to capital than labor. They also fail to achieve full employment, thus perpetuating the precariousness of the labor market.

Tcherneva describes the key features of the alternative bottom up approach this way....

The Politics of Envy – that old chestnut from the neo-liberals – is bandied around every time there is any insinuation that the capitalist system produces distributional outcomes that are not remotely proportional to the effort put into production. Whenever governments challenge the distributional outcomes – for example, propose increasing taxes on the higher income recipients (note I don’t use the word “earners”) there is hell to cry and the defense put up always appeals to the old tags – “socialist class warriors undermining incentive”, “envy”, etc. In the 1980s, when privatisation formed the first wave of the neo-liberal onslaught, we all apparently became “capitalists” or “shareholders”. We were told that it was dinosauric to think in terms of the old class categories – labour and capital. That was just so “yesterday” and we should just get over it and realise that we all had a stake in a system where reduced regulation and oversight would produce unimaginable wealth, even if the first manifestations of this new “incentivised” economy channelled increasing shares of real income to the highest percentiles in the distribution. No worries, “trickle-down” would spread the largesse. We know better now – and increasingly the recognition, exemplified in 2006 by Warren Buffett’s suggestion that “There’s class warfare, all right … but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning” (Source), is that class is alive and well and in prosecuting their demands for higher shares of real income, the elites have not only caused the crisis but are now, in recovery, reinstating the dynamics that will lead to the next crisis. The big changes in policy structures that have to be made to avoid another global crisis are not even remotely on the radar.

Dearius Merritt, a striking Church’s Chicken assistant manager in Memphis, Tenn., .. described fast food workers in his city as “fed up.”

“They’re tired of coming to work and having to work eight hours, nine hours, and them coming home and they can barely provide for their kids,” he said. When asked whether he was afraid of retaliation from management, he shrugged the question off, saying, “It’s bigger than me and it’s bigger than the workers that are standing up. It’s not just going to help my generation, it’s going to help the next generation that’s going to come, and the generation after that.”

[Face it, you've NEVER heard Hank Paulson utter such words. Nothing's bigger than his ego ... or his pocketbook of illicit gains.]

ps: The 1% lobby is already at work here, getting in a dig at supposedly failed unions. However, a look at the AFL-CIO's site shows that they've been covering the strike efforts since their planning stages, and urging union members of all stripes to either boycott the targeted establishments and/or not cross picket lines.

ps: These efforts are all NECESSARY, but none will be SUFFICIENT, if they don't also co-tune all points of a culture's agility spectrum - tools, tactics, strategies, policies, goals and desired outcomes. At least we now have a beachhead.ps: ps: ps: Note that "people did get together"can others besides the most oppressed also "get together" ? when?

The old saying “fighting fire with fire” may be true or not depending upon the situation, but if someone told you the best way to fight (carbon-based) gas is with another gas, you might raise a skeptical eyebrow or two. But that’s exactly what…

I will be teaching strategies and tactics that will enable you to successfully day trade and swing trade foreign currencies. All instruction on the Oanda system, which is by far the most sophisticated online trading platform. And some of the emerging market currencies that Oanda has available to trade are, Indian rupee, Thai baht, Taiwan dollar, Polish zloty, Hungarian forint and many others.

Some of the things I will be teaching include:

How to take steady, consistent, profits day trading foreign currencies
How to sell high and buy low with ease and precision
How time zones can clue you in to market direction
How to put the odds in your favor on every trade
How to limit losses without frequent stop outs
How to take advantage of the news for big profits
How to use support and resistance the way savvy pros do
Carefree yet highly effective order entry
The smart way to place stop loss orders

How about matching federal funding at some percentage to cover R&D expenses? Alternative transport is a high priority, with the huge carbon footprint of air transport. Even those who hold that climate change is either not occurring or is not caused by humans, the health consequences of pollution are a significant externality that is not being figured into true carbon-based energy cost.

Who knew that there were 2, collectively random paths in this race to the bottom? Each co-dependent upon the other, circling their respectively dimming lights as they sink into the mess.

It's a tag team fight to the finish. Involving the Physically Deprived and Deranged plus the Morally Repugnant and Deranged on one team. There is no other team! [At least no other statistically significant representation, barring a comeback by the Moderate Majority, e.g. those not currently participating in this carnival show.]

So, other than throwing the occasional drone into the international audience, the members of TEAM-USA have dutifully agreed to a brawl among themselves, until a suitable outside challenger shows up. However, the audience is getting restless, and they may not wait long before replacing the whole show with some other production.

If we want to at least preserve the stage, shouldn't TEAM-USA stick to team training, instead of putting on it's own show? Infighting is a lose-lose situation. Zero regulation of national self isn't a useful path. Everything in excess just falls off the rails faster. Or, as Bill Black puts it:

Isn't class war analogous to Organ War, where the brain has placed a tourniquet around the neck, and the body is losing? :( [As an aside: What would a cultural face-palm signal look like? Please send your suggestions. Can we still muster the cultural bloodflow to signal one to ourselves?]

Instead of focusing on the trivial social-tourniquet question and the trivial answer, let's focus on the audience which must even ask this question of itself, and why it's stuck asking the same old, self-obvious question.

Saying is not the same as being heard. The accurate statement of the old Marketing Rule is that a message has to be RECEIVED 12 times - on average - before it registers with a resident. We have ~315 million residents in the USA alone. Be honest. What's the desired outcome that matters more than all others in this campaign - and what methods are needed to even take a step in that direction? Does 10% of the US electorate understand enough Civic Operations, Political Operations and Currency Operations to even make sense of their collective context?

Hence, don't be surprised that Bill Mitchell is fighting an uphill battle, still trying to get a 6000 year old message heard by an adequate proportion of people. Our population growth rate has ALWAYS outraced our self-knowledge propagation methods. We keep growing team-size faster than we can perfect team coordination.

Human populations are ALWAYS a context late and a paradigm behind.

Real things change, folks, so yesterday's adequately real metric is totally nominal, virtual and outmoded today. We just have to keep our civic awareness within striking distance of reality, not necessarily spot on. How do we know when we're failing, and it's time for a version upgrade? When our policy institutions start to become academic jokes?

Before delving into potential methods to use, don't we need to settle on the capabilities we want to achieve? Where are we, where do we want to go, and only then how to get there from here? Since those all keep changing, what should we focus on? Most critically, adaptive cultural evolution means keeping an electorate and policy apparatus that can and does ADJUST just fast enough to chase faint survival paths. The path keeps disappearing, so just keep finding the path. Maintain group agility and maneuverability. This ain't rocket science.

That should be obvious to anyone who ever stops to actually think. Unfortunately, we teach - and allow - students to do everything EXCEPT that.

It's no wonder we maintain an electorate that keeps their eyes on everything except our own, emerging OUTCOMES!

Have some of our policy institutions become a total joke? Witness this twitter exchange, then decide for yourself.

When you have clowns like Joe Kernan, Ranting Rick Santelli and Larry Kudlow as three of your top anchors, what do you expect? Even the uneducated public is smarter than these three when it comes to financial matters.

CNBC execs should wake up and smell the coffee. When it comes to economics and Wall Street, this show's content is comically out-of-paradigm and irrelevant. That's why nobody watches.

“(1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often”.

Simpson is an accomplished mathematician who abandoned neoclassical economics after his career in academe and applied economics consultancy. He advocates a more modern maths than that derived from 19th century physics.

There's money to be made in trading emerging market currencies and on the Oanda platform you can trade Indian rupee, Taiwan dollar, Turkish lira, Hungarian forint, Thai baht, Polish zloty, among others.

In my Sep 16 - Sep 20 online Forex trading course I teach how to use the Oanda system. The entire course is taught on the Oanda system.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Monday said that it was a “scary thought” that elites could be culling the population with vaccines to preserve the Earth’s resources. The Texas Republican spent part of his five-week break from Congress this week…

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told a crowd in South Carolina this week that unemployed people were like children who wanted to eat before they had done their chores. At a closed-door Charleston event put on by conservative activist Mallory Factor, King said…

And people ridiculed William Vickrey! He was nearly the only sane one, for decades! Along with Warren Mosler, and JK Galbraith, and Lerner, and Kalecki, etc, etc - not to mention Marriner Eccles. These are all people who knew that economic policy was too important to be left to the economists - orthodox economists who flat out ignore real operations on the ground ... in their own training, education and ideological practice.

What went wrong? What are we still doing wrong?

Logic and awareness of operational reality is clearly never our main impediment. Some people in every aggregate always know what the group needs to attend to. Rather, our #1 problem seems to be stubbornness in refusing to listen to all of ourselves, refusing to acknowledge inter-dependencies outside our personal specialty, and - if we are forced to acknowledge them - calling them irrelevant "externalities" instead.

Can that hurdle be overcome? Of course it can. Homo Sapiens has been meeting and exceeding that task for ~200K years! It just takes preparation, training and constant practice - on a scale larger than anything we've done before. Yet that's what humans do. In fact, it's all we've ever done. Why stop now? We need everyone to participate in calling everyone's attention to things they actively do NOT want to know, if left in isolation. Our chief hurdle is, at heart, a social recruitment task. Learning to organize on a larger scale, every year, every generation. The only alternative is suicide, and we've supposedly made that illegal. :(

How do we recruit and convince enough of ourselves to maintain an adequate rate of re-sampling the full - and always enlarging - spectrum of changing contexts, so as to maintain awareness of emerging options?

Many historical precedents are available for your evaluation. To avoid prejudicing further discussion any further, I'll mention only two, .

Unfortunately, even Vickrey neglects the simple semantics that trip up Jane and Joe Sixpack, and slow their recruitment (~150 million in the USA alone!, and another 150 million students in training - there's no time to waste). He's stuck on initial statement in non-portable jargon.

However, if you replace the above with something like the text below, you have a potentially portable message, that ~150 million adults might follow. PLEASE! Feel free to suggest 1001 different ways to get everyone from 4th graders on down to economists to understand this dynamic systems issue. Whatever rephrasing you suggest, WE'LL NEED THEM ALL! Tomorrow. No, make that TODAY!! By COB. Certainly before COE (collapse of economy).

“The great increase in average lifespan has - initially - produced a surge in the desire of distributed individuals to accumulate personal assets for personal retirement. However, distributed hoarding is not what social species excel at.

Consequently, the initial, personal desire to ramp up distributed hoarding of static assets has outpaced the ability of distributed populations to both produce and hoard enough static assets.

It is, however, quite simple - through accumulation of the dynamic asset of teamwork - for a growing population to meet and exceed all the emerging needs of a growing population of children, adults and elderly alike. It's the return on coordination that counts the most. That return is the only thing that exceeds all mounting costs, including the cost of coordination.

To grow as a nation, we therefore need steadily increasing public investment - aka, "fiat," simply DENOMINATED as fiat currency numerals - to meet the steadily increasing demand for adequate personal income throughout a growing population executing increasingly more, better, faster and leaner economic transactions. Calling that public investment in ourselves, our children & our later descendants a purely virtual "debt" to ourselves is not just broken semantics, it is useless and counterproductive sophistry."

"Forget the math until you have got a basis in observation and experiment to direct the mathematician...." David Talbott

Interesting video from a group of inter-disciplinary academics who are also engaged in a multi-decade long scientific investigation which often conflicts with entrenched mainstream academic beliefs but in the area of astrophysics.

The methods of challenge within the academe that they seem to face in their mission of true science seem hauntingly familiar...

The recent advancement in information technology is enabling observation and documentation of information never before available to humans both terrestrial and celestial.

ALL truly intelligent humans can review this observed information and determine if the previous held beliefs or theories of so-called "settled science" (oxymoron???) is congruent with the newly happened upon observed information.

To proceed in any other fashion is truly NOT intelligent behavior. "Stupid and blind!" - Mat 23:17

The failure of civil rights leaders to address “Wall Street criminality” illustrates how money has corrupted American culture, according to Professor Cornel West. At book launching event on August 24 following the 50th Anniversary March on Washington…

Bill Mitchell provides analysis of the "public debt problem" in the US to show that there isn't any. So much for "Fixing The Debt," and "who will buy the bonds?"

As a proponent of MMT, I do not consider there to be a public debt problem in the US so the analysis presented here is out of interest rather than establishing anything substantive.

However, what it shows is that even within the voluntarily-constrained system that regulates the relationship between the US treasury and the central bank, the latter can still effectively buy as much US government debt as it likes.

House Speaker John Boehner said Monday that getting the GOP-controlled House to agree to raising the U.S. debt ceiling will only come with a bipartisan deal to make cost-saving changes to Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, farm programs and government pensions....

“I made up my mind that we weren’t going to kick the can down the road any more,” Boehner, R-Ohio, told a Boise lunch crowd at a fundraiser for Idaho’s 2nd District Congressman Mike Simpson. “We’re not going to inflict all of this pain and suffering on our kids and our grandkids.”

Translation: The establishments of both parties are preparing for a deal that benefits the plutocrats that they can each sell to their own base as the best deal that could be gotten. The good side is that both parties will try to gain maximum advantage, which is likely to scuttle the deal as it has in the past.

The Great financial Crisis came, for a lot of economists, out of the blue. The BIS (Bank for International Settlements) has investigated a whole lot of ‘early warning indicators’. And it seems that financial crises are predictable after all. And guess what – ‘debt’ is not neutral. And neither is money (to be more precise: the shares of different kinds of money:”cross-border liabilities plus M3 minus M2 (proxy for non-core liabilities) divided by M2 (proxy for core liabilities“). Might it have been the case that some people who did predict the crisis did look at such variables?

Even if you don't follow housing closely, this is something to be aware of. Charts illustrate if you just want a quick overview. Housing seems to have bottomed and recovery is in progress. As Bill notes, the figures are through June and don't take into consideration the recent rise in mortgage rates. Latest reports are indicating that this is having an adverse effect on the recovery, along with stagnant incomes in a weak economic recovery and credit still relatively tight.

The U.S. government took the latest step toward regulating virtual currencies on Monday as representatives from the Bitcoin Foundation met behind closed doors with federal officials in Washington. Attendees say the meeting was cordial, with regulators listening carefully as Bitcoin advocates warned that excessive regulation could drive innovation in virtual currencies overseas.

The issue is the balance between privacy and criminality, which is a major one in an open society. Crime flourishes in the dark, and too much light invites excessive government control. Finding an appropriate balance is neither obvious nor simple in many cases.

The New York Fed has long collected market information from its primary dealer trading counterparts and released these data in aggregated form to the public. Until recently, such data have only been available for broad categories of securities (for example, Treasury bills as a group) and not for specific securities. In April 2013, the Fed began releasing data on some specific Treasury issues, allowing for a more refined understanding of market conditions and dealer behavior.

I sincerely wish it would end. It's getting as bad as radio or tv commercials.

Isn't this the 12th time we've heard this message, in recent memory? Who's paying the advertising bill for this campaign?

Let me get this straight, the issuer of a fiat currency is in "danger" of not being able to issue fiat? ... Uh, .... how is one supposed to respond ... to something that disorienting? Do you just back away slowly? Or relieve the derelict of their duty, on the spot?

I'm losing track, what's the difference between:

fiat debt limit ... & ... FUD bet Luddite?

Seriously, you have to wonder how long Socrates listened to Sophists say that HIS dog, which was a mother, was therefore HIS mother ... before 'ol Soc got tired of the inane BS, kicked 'em in the arse, and threw 'em bodily out of the lecture hall!

Seriously folks, we got a country to run here. And, a half-starved Middle Class to resuscitate. We ain't got time for this.

There are limits to listening to nonsense from Sophist Luddites. Surely 12x is an acceptable limit ... in one month? Even in 3 generations!

Monday, August 26, 2013

The power of the banking lobby (and the financial industry more generally) is immense, from campaign contributions to regulatory capture of various kinds. It would be nice to imagine that the UK was less vulnerable than the US in this respect, but there are good reasons to think otherwise. As a result, the power and influence of banks and bankers within government has hardly suffered as a result of the Great Recession that they played a large part in creating.So to return to my original question, would it really have made much difference if more mainstream economists had been fretting about the position of the financial sector before the crisis? I think they would have been ignored then even more than they are being ignored now. The single most effective way of avoiding another financial crisis is to reduce the political influence of the banking sector.

Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden got stuck in the transit zone of a Moscow airport because Havana said it would not let him fly from Russia to Cuba, a Russian newspaper reported on Monday....

Citing several sources, including one close to the U.S. State Department, Kommersant newspaper said the reason was that at the last minute Cuba told officials to stop Snowden from boarding the Aeroflot flight.

It said Cuba had changed its mind after pressure by the United States, which wants to try Snowden on espionage charges.

The biggest fiscal challenge facing the U.S. is the size of projected deficits in the 2020s and 2030s, according to a survey of business economists.

The National Association for Business Economics surveyed 220 of its members in July and August. The survey found that members were more concerned about the size of deficits in the next two decades than current deficits or deficits over the next 10 years: 43 percent of the economists named budget gaps in the 2020s and 2030s as the top fiscal challenge, compared with 37 percent who chose projected deficits over the next 10 years.The policy survey found that no consensus on the best way to address those deficits.

The NABE said 39 percent of those surveyed felt the best way to address the deficit-to-gross domestic product ratio in the next few decades is a mix of spending restraint and increased revenue. It said 32 percent believe the best single tool would be greater spending restraint, and 20 percent said enacting policies designed to encourage economic growth would be the best tactic.

Ballooning costs for Social Security and Medicare as the U.S. population ages are expected to result in growing long-term budget deficits.

I was asked to provide some testimonials from people who took my Forex course in the past. Here are some below. The next course will be held Sep 16 - Sep 20. Get info Mike Norman Forex trading course.

Mike,I wanted to take the time to thank you and tell you that your techniques freed me from fear. I am no longer afraid to take the trade. I know I can fix whatever comes at me or at least break even. This has been my biggest issue in trading. Since your class I have been trading fear free and enjoying it. -Chuck

I came into the boot camp not knowing anything about forex or forex trading. Prior to the class I did logon to the Oanda system to learn the basics of the software and forex nomenclature, I would very much recommend anyone not familiar with forex to take the time to do this first. In the three day course Mike was able to convey a clear step by step methodology and demonstrate trading techniques that not only anyone can understand but are actually practical to use. Mike describes how to understand what makes the Forex markets move, how to position yourself for success, and if need how to work out of a negative position. Mike was very engaging, entertaining, and keep a fast pace for the entire class. I had high expectations for the class and I can say that not only were my expectations met but in many way they were exceeded. I now have the knowledge and confidence to begin forex trading. How successful I will be is still an unknown but I do know that Mike has committed to all his students that he can be contacted for questions and advice. I highly recommend the boot camp and I am sure if you take the class you will feel the same. -Dan

Mike,First let me say that you have revolutionized my trading...most importantly me. The lecture for me was like getting a shot of steroids! I have increased in confidence just from your seminar you've taught. I was very timid of losses and making mistakes, but your talks, strategy and kick in the butt has transformed me. Thank you!

Dear Mike,I wanted to personally thank you for the Forex course you gave. I have already made 80 pips today directly as a result of your methods. I have NEVER made 80 pips in one day. I was becoming so frustrated and negative, having been new to trading since this past October. Many many many many thanks!!! -David

Mike,I LOVED having you as an instructor and I absolutely love your trading style and have been using it as well. Blessings, Mike. -Jay

Charity groups in Raleigh, North Carolina are criticizing local police over what they call a sudden enforcement of a local ordinance prohibiting them from feeding the homeless. “The police are caught up in a system,” Rev. Hugh Hollowell told WRAL…

What does the Middle Class have to do? Storm the Bastille-Ivory-Towers? Must ideology be guillotined, to draw even semi-equal attention to operational reality?

All credit to Warren Mosler for many further clarifications about fiat currency operations (see below), but he just wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Nor has he (like Greenspan, Geithner, Larry Summers & Obama) sold his soul to Charles Keating & Robert Rubin et al, and his country down the river.

Also, wider dissemination of Warren's clear, operational views would be helped by cross-discipline translation of specific, semantic terms into consistent forms that Jane and Joe Sixpack can easily follow.

Fiat: has always been another word for initiative, individual or public.

Fiat currency: one expression of public initiative, or public fiat.

Once the semantics are defined, of course it's clear that investing fiat (public initiative) does not depend upon prior saving of public initiative (fiat). In fact, that proposed sequence constitutes a nonsensical oxymoron. Our simple task is to right-size our national currency supply AND ITS DISTRIBUTION, by both avoiding either inflation or deflation AND simultaneously, constantly improving the quality of distributed decision-making.

PT Barnum wouldn't be proud of the intelligence or morals of our current electorate and the the politicians they select - but he would applaud the brazen audacity with which they bamboozle themselves through lack of thinking.

I am pleased to announce that Scott Baker will be contributing posts to Mike Norman Economics. Scott is a widely followed blogger over at OpEdNews, where he writes with a strong progressive voice. I'm sure you will appreciate Scott's contributions here, so please join me in welcoming him on board.

We are witnessing transitions from social-welfare states to social-control states around the world.

Contemporary capitalism and its characteristics:

Among the qualitative shifts that have taken place in the capitalist system in the face of globalization in recent decades, there are four I want to underscore.

First is the rise of truly transnational capital and the integration of every country into a new globalized production and financial system.

Second is the appearance of a new transnational capitalist class (TCC). This is a class group grounded in new global circuits of accumulation rather than the older national circuits.

Third is the rise of what I term transnational state apparatuses.

And fourth is the appearance of novel relations of inequality and domination in global society, including an increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities....

The response to the global financial crisis: the players:

One is what we could call "reformism from above." This reformism is aimed at stabilizing the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical responses from below....

A second response is popular, grass-roots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world, there appears to be a mounting global revolt....

Yet another response is what I term 21st century fascism. The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organize a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class.... It involves militarism, extreme masculinization, homophobia, racism and a racist mobilization against scapegoats, which includes the search for scapegoats (such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims).

Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealized and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalizes and glamorizes warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is even portrayed as heroic.

The Issue:

It is important to stress that the need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organized mass social control of the world's surplus population and rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism.... With this in mind, let us conclude with five points for ongoing debate with regard to policing global capitalism.

The New Road to Serfdom:

From social consent to social control to social coercion by a police state in service of global capitalism made necessary by the contradictions inherent in global capitalism resulting from privilege and inequality.

They say
that "ideas never really die, they just get recycled" This adage has
become increasingly true of macroeconomics in the modern era.

It is
quite depressing to see not just economists, but government policymakers from
the 1930's and 40's describing all the same realities of a fiat currency
issuing government that MMTers are pushing for today. There has been such a
dark age of Macroeconomics since World War Two, with the current crop of
economists having been brought up in the myopic age of neoliberalism.

Even
before Keynes published his seminal "General Theory" in 1936, Eccles clearly and repeatedly stated that federal taxes serve not to raise revenue, but as a way to control inflation. He openly
acknowledged that post gold standard, the federal government's only spending
constraint was inflation, not any arbitrary dollar amount or debt/gdp ratio. He
strongly advocated for lower taxes and higher spending to boost the depressed
economy, and even fought FDR over the funding Social Security with payroll
taxes, arguing correctly that such a "tax and savings" process was
economically meaningless and counter-stimulative (sound familiar?!?!)

Godammit.
There's nothing new under the Red, White and Blue. Since the name of Lord
Keynes has been dragged through the mud by the right wing propaganda machines,
lets call ourselves "Ecclesians". Its new and has an almost biblical
sound to it. Obviously Eccles was smart enough that they named the Fed Board of
Governors building in Washington, DC after him. Plus Eccles has the benefit of
being an American who worked in government, and was not, to my knowledge, an
"effete homosexual" as Keynes was described by the always-classy Niall Ferguson a few months ago.

The term and meaning of a Resource Based Economy was originated by Jacque Fresco. It is a holistic socio-economic system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude. All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few. The premise upon which this system is based is that the Earth is abundant with plentiful resource; our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter productive to our survival.

Modern society has access to highly advanced technology and can make available food, clothing, housing and medical care; update our educational system; and develop a limitless supply of renewable, non-contaminating energy. By supplying an efficiently designed economy, everyone can enjoy a very high standard of living with all of the amenities of a high technological society.

A resource-based economy would utilize existing resources from the land and sea, physical equipment, industrial plants, etc. to enhance the lives of the total population. In an economy based on resources rather than money, we could easily produce all of the necessities of life and provide a high standard of living for all.

R. Buckminster Fuller was saying this over a half century ago, post WWII, when he analyzed resource availability and use. He observed that the issue was two-fold, the first being national boundaries as imaginary lines drawn on maps. The second follows from that. Ninety percent of resources use at the time of his study was military-related.

Consider the following examples: At the beginning of World War II the US had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was no, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.

Affordability is never the issue. As Bucky Fuller emphasized, the only actual issue is the availability of real resources that can be provided by applying human ingenuity to material resource to do more with less by constant innovation.

Bucky further observed that over the centuries, the issue has been increasing leisure to the point of making better education more widely available. At one time the leisure was limited to the ruling class, which alone received education and had the means to use in contributing to culture and civilization. If Fuller saw a solution to all social problems, it was increasing the general level of education. This requires increasing leisure.

In a civilization of leisure, the pace of discovery would continue to be a function of education. With higher education available to all, the planet would become a Bell Labs, and the discoveries of the few would lead to greater abundance for all, as it has in the past.

In a resource-based economy all of the world's resources are held as the common heritage of all of Earth's people, thus eventually outgrowing the need for the artificial boundaries that separate people. This is the unifying imperative.

This stands in contrast to the present plan for globalization by the ruling elite, as recorded by one of the great historians of the 20th century, Carroll Quigley, Professor of History at Georgetown University and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, in Tragedy and Hope, 1966., ch. 20:

"The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

The Venus Project specifically dissociated itself from this project.

We must emphasize that this approach to global governance has nothing whatever in common with the present aims of an elite to form a world government with themselves and large corporations at the helm, and the vast majority of the world's population subservient to them. Our vision of globalization empowers each and every person on the planet to be the best they can be, not to live in abject subjugation to a corporate governing body.

Our proposals would not only add to the well being of people, but they would also provide the necessary information that would enable them to participate in any area of their competence. The measure of success would be based on the fulfillment of one's individual pursuits rather than the acquisition of wealth, property and power.

Money? No problem.

If the thought of eliminating money troubles you, consider this: If a group of people with gold, diamonds and money were stranded on an island that had no resources such as food, clean air and water, their wealth would be irrelevant to their survival. It is only when resources are scarce that money can be used to control their distribution. One could not, for example, sell the air we breathe or water abundantly flowing down from a mountain stream. Although air and water are valuable, in abundance they cannot be sold.

Money is only needed as a medium of exchange where there is scarcity and distribution needs to be rationed, and as store of value where there is insecurity. In the new system the unit of account will be purely digital and goods "bar coded" so that the global AI overseer knows what's needed where and on what schedule. Then humanity can turn its attention to civilization instead of some toiling for others.

Money is only important in a society when certain resources for survival must be rationed and the people accept money as an exchange medium for the scarce resources. Money is a social convention, an agreement if you will. It is neither a natural resource nor does it represent one. It is not necessary for survival unless we have been conditioned to accept it as such.

The obstacle is consciousness. We to evolve to that point as a species and I am confident that it is coming in one form or another. As humanity grows up socially, it will politically and economically, too.

In A Theory of Economic History (1973), John Hicks observes that the socio-economics system of primitive peoples was (is) communal. This was succeed in at the time of surplus production by command system under the temple or palace. This was succeeded at the twilight of the Agricultural Age and the beginning of the Industrial Age by the market system. The social bond in the communal system is kinship. The social bond in the command system is fealty. The social bond in the market system is money.

It is important to realize that from the institutional perspective one system did not replace the other. Rather, new ways of systematically acting in concert are layered over previous systems. The present system is a combination of communal, command, and market, with an integration of cooperation and teamwork, government control, and market distribution based on monetary exchange.

While some have argued that the market system is the end of history, there is no way to predict what will emerge subsequently in a complex adaptable system. What we do know is that increasing complexity generate not only larger challenges but challenges of a different type that call forth different solutions that change fundamental relationships of a group.

So we can be reasonably sure that while previous institutions won't entirely disappear they will adapt and new solutions will emerge that eclipse them, too, but not entirely, just as communal and command-based systems are integrated with the dominant market-based system in modern representative democracies.

The Venus Project aims to be part of the solution.

The Venus Project offers a comprehensive plan for social reclamation in which human beings, technology and nature will be able to coexist in a long term, sustainable state of dynamic equilibrium

Eighty years ago, Marriner Eccles explained that issuing fiat is even more important than simply personally using it. Going further, Warren Mosler has for years repeated the message that big finance - the glorification of using vs generating public initiative - is an industry that is more trouble than it is worth.

The same certainly now seems to be true of most aspects of politics. Rather than continuously, and artfully, building the general welfare of the people, politics in the USA has descended into a pit of dogs bickering over the dwindling economic bones of our neglected Middle Class. Is any current political office holder demonstrating that generating statesmanship is more important than simply locally using pork-barrel politics? None that I know of!

The gist of the article is that a growing nation, despite all efforts at self-assisted suicide, is .... get this ... refusing to die! And, it might actually eke out a bit of growth! Let's hope that the orthodox economists don't notice the faint beeps still wafting from the Middle Class heart monitor. They might pull the remaining Middle Class Life Support ... to save ... WHAT?

Well, seems they're intent upon saving fiat. Yes, it's that same old story. By self-strangulation, holding the country's economic breath 'til the nation turns blue, shooting various social feet, and having our culture sit on it's arse in the evolutionary road ... some morons expect that we will save up enough unused public initiative to buy ourselves a breather.

You could not make this up.

If we don't just die, we may die laughing at the oafs promoting themselves as leaders! It's as though a political artery has burst and Congress has been deprived of a critical flow of common sense. Thereby leaving half the street paralyzed and Wall-ed off, while the Main side of the street attempts to drag the dead weight around as a senseless burden.

And what is the response in the cognitively deprived zone? From there, there are new calls to make the self-assisted social suicide "Bi-Partisan." That's right. Their call is for all sides to jump in and help shoot more economic feet, faster. Citizens, hear - or throw - them out! Their message is that if you see some traitor expressing personal initiative ... execute a citizens arrest and STOP THEM, before it's too late! They might use up all our public initiative?

Ok, for the sake of humor, let's assume reality is insanity, and insanity reality. So what is their beef in this Washington Post article? They're asking why this problem not going away? Why won't our economy die? Comically - and consistent with their theme so far - they supply a common sense answer to an insane question. "Most of the people who came in saying, ‘We’re going to change Washington,’ simply didn't understand Washington,” said Steve Bell, a longtime Republican staffer who now works at the Bipartisan Policy Center."

Is that a fact! Who says there aren't drolls in DC?

They admit they don't know how Washington works? How about how all the other things in this universe work? Might it be easier to list on one hand anything that these morons DO understand the working of?

"But even now, the government still spends a vast amount of [fiat currency]."

You don't say! You have to admit, they're really on a droll.

As an analogy, have any of these wits noticed, even now, that their own insentient corpse still exhales a vast amount of carbon dioxide? Where do they think all that carbon comes from. It doesn't just grow on trees, they know. :(

[Yes. It's heart wrenching to even have these inane discussions with US citizens. Zombie a-pork-olypse may be the ONLY thing keeping the USA alive at this point - simply for lack of any sentient motivation. Oddly, our biggest example of Aggregate Demand may be the growing need to establish nursing homes for deranged political analysts.]

Ok, I'll beat my head against their brick wall. And why is it- genius - that our nation is still expending public initiative, i.e., fiat? Why is our public spending commensurate with the size of a nation struggling to grow? "It is still so big primarily because Congress and Obama have largely failed to deal with programs such as Medicare, Social Security and food stamps."

That's right. You knew it was coming.

Their message: if there's a sociological process still functioning, kill it! If these idiots were clinicians, they'd be searching for signs of blood flow, respiration, kidney function and synaptic activity in order to stop them before the patient ran out of personal initiative. It's as though people have gone mad, and been placed in control of schools of government! Would we place the homicidally deranged in control of our Medical Schools? What is going on in this country?

"It’s that old problem of concentrated benefits with diffuse costs." What? They're letting their own looting strategy be used as a defense for self-assisted suicide of anyone left un-looted? Let's get this straight. We shouldn't let any concentrated benefit to the Middle Class cause any diffuse detriment to the 1%? Are they mocking us, along with themselves? Or just being such a black hole of density that no logic can escape the null of their irrationality field?

And, as a sign of the End Times, the Washington Post author trots out a chilling statistic. The sum of all accumulating Federal Regulations is longer than the King James Bible!!! I'm just going to let that one lie in whatever field the King decreed it be found.

Is there a moral to this story? Best one I can find is this. The moral of this Washington Post frontpage story is that David Fahrenthold and his ilk have no morals, and no brains left functioning either.

Magna dum Flawed?

ps: David Farenthold, originally of Houston, Tx, quotes one Rep. Blake Farenthold (R., Tx). You don't suppose they're related? Surely the reporter would say, one way or another?

ps: ps: Does this article illustrate that corporate news media is also an industry that is more trouble than it is worth - at least to our nation?

*Is this is an example of the new editorial direction the Post will take, under ownership of Jeff Bezos?